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Rise in antipsychotic drugs is troubling

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I’m old enough now to see vast differences in the safety of our schools today compared with my
school years of the 1950s and ’60s. If you go back even further, you will see even less likelihood
of any traumatic event, such as the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. It was unheard of.

So we look for answers. Or do we?

Our media go after the method while ignoring a huge common denominator. It’s so glaring, a
person would have to be blind not to see it. Over the past 25 to 30 years, the rate at which
society, and especially young people, are prescribed antipsychotic medications has skyrocketed.
Today, we drug our children for just about every mood variant. Parents are conditioned today to
look for “disorders.” Is your child too rambunctious? Is your child having temper tantrums? Did
your child tell you he hated you? Does your child not always pay attention to instruction?

The list goes on and on and on, and for each of these questions, there is a “disorder” or label
attached for which drugs are prescribed.
TheDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has gotten so huge, one has to
wonder if some of these disorders are manufactured simply to justify drugs, which now are an
industry surpassing $18 billion a year.

It’s far more lucrative for today’s psychiatrist to prescribe a drug than it is to treat a
patient in the traditional manner. Psychiatrists’ first line of treatment is a mind-altering
drug.

Since there are black-box warnings on these medications concerning aggression, mania, homicidal
and suicidal thoughts and tendencies while ingesting them, should we not be looking at that glaring
probability? Apparently not, because it’s a topic that is almost never broached.

In every media outlet, one sees almost nonstop ads pushing these drugs for every condition under
the sun. There was a time when prescription drugs never were advertised, but today, the profit seen
by Big Pharma is astronomical due to its public marketing. I find it extremely disconcerting.

And so, if no one else will, I will ask the questions:

Was the Newtown shooter, Adam Lanza, on a prescribed antipsychotic? If so, for how long, which
one and was it helping his condition, whatever that might have been? Was any other help forthcoming
to him? Was he suffering side effects that were being ignored by his family and his physicians?

I won’t hold my breath for answers, though. We not only live in a gun culture, we live in a
prescription-drug culture, and that has produced horrific consequences.

When there’s that much money involved and when Big Pharma has a stranglehold on government and
the people are drugged with little question, we will continue to see horrific events such as Sandy
Hook Elementary School, and no gun law on the planet will change that.